Thank you for being skinny

(Said by a woman on my plane flight home earlier this week, as I settled into my economy-class seat beside her.)

I’ve been overweight for pretty much all of my life.  Not morbidly obese by any means, but just enough that I’ve always thought of myself as being a bit fat, and doctors have always recommended that I try to lose a bit of weight.  And having a job which requires remaining seated for long periods certainly hasn’t helped matters any. About eight months ago, I started watching my food intake and visiting the gym four or five times a week, and over that period I’ve lost just over 20kg (that’s about 44 pounds, in the old maths).  Which now puts me comfortably within my “healthy weight zone” for the first time in my life.  (personally, I’d still like to lose at least another 5kg, though)

It’s kind of funny.  As I’ve been losing all that weight, nobody has ever mentioned it.  Not once.  And my mental image of myself never really changed, either, even when I had to start buying new clothes because the old ones were turning into tents on me.  Funny how unchanging that mental image of oneself can be.

Anyhow.  This casual comment from a stranger kind of made my day, so I had to blog about it.  (And then a friend inquired whether I hadn’t lost some weight over my holiday, about twelve hours later.  Too late, dude, the random airplane stranger pipped you at the post.)

In other news, the studio I use for VGKnowHow opens up again next week, so hopefully I’ll have some new episodes filmed and ready to go by the end of next week.  I’m still arguing with myself over the next topic, but it’ll almost certainly end up being camera basics.

Finally, now that my holiday is over, I’m left trying to decide what to be spending my development resources on;  whether to continue on with the re-imagined Spratt game that I’ve been posting about (as I’ve found that the game in its initial design simply isn’t compelling, and buffing up the game mechanics to the point where it becomes interesting requires more screen real estate than we realistically have on a phone), or whether to discard that avenue of development and return to MMORPG Tycoon 2, or whether to set both of those two projects aside, and instead start on a more conventional game design that could be completed within a more predictable schedule (but which presumably therefore wouldn’t be as intriguing a concept as either Spratt 2 or MT2.)